The Content Conundrum: Crafting a Lasting Marketing Strategy

You listen to enough podcasts to know that content is king. You’ve allocated resources and budget to craft some truly killer content. Now, you’ve just got to figure out where to spend your killer-content currency — and whether it’s working. You have a content conundrum, and it needs solving.

Today’s guest, Erik Newton, VP of Marketing at Milestone, has built a career of solving the content conundrum, and he joins the show to share how you can, too.

Understanding content as currency

Content is all around us — television, billboards, advertisements — but how often do you think of content as a currency: an exchange of time and attention for knowledge or entertainment? Understanding content in this way is helping marketers leverage content more effectively.

Tofu, Mofu, & Bofu

Used as a content framework, it can guide marketers on the type of content to produce:

• Tofu: Top of Funnel — People are finding you without knowing your brand directly.
• Mofu: Middle of Funnel — Helping people solve their problems with your product.
• Bofu: Bottom of Funnel — Sharing evaluative-type content with interested people.

What makes impactful content

As the cost of time and attention inflates, content has to be of the highest quality to keep up. But, how exactly is quality content made?

“Putting a little bit of extra effort into rich media gets your content more attention.”

Erik Newton, VP of Marketing at Milestone

According to Erik, the content must be helpful, original, solve problems, answer questions, be entertaining and be evocative.

Avoiding the content conundrum

You can produce great content, but if that content doesn’t have the legs to carry it, it goes to waste. Erik shares some ways to avoid this conundrum:

1. Surround content with accessibility: If you’re producing high-quality content but presenting it on a slow website, you’ll lose customers to faster competitors.
2. Increase visibility: If you aren’t top of the list with search engines, it won’t matter how great your content is.
3. Use schemas: Integrate metadata onto your webpages that’s only visible to the search crawler.
4. “We help customers increase visibility, especially in the two biggest channels, search, and local. And the way we do that is helping them research and identify and create great content.”
5. Erik Newton, VP of Marketing at Milestone

Don’t skimp on delivery

Creating high-quality content is a must to keep customers engaged, but don’t ignore the vehicle that is delivering that content. It’s a potentially huge misstep that can leave your content falling flat with your audience.

For more tips from Erik, check out his book: Hack the Corporate Fast Track.

Now that you know how to solve the content conundrum, are you ready to learn buyer-first principles or take a deep dive into the role data should play in your organization? Check out the full list of episodes: The B2B Revenue Executive Experience.